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AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

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Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#401

Post by etiam »

"Along with the original title, it is among the biggest and most successful games of all time, with players competing in esports tournaments for more than 20 years."

...

Dear Mister Language Person: I am curious about the expression, "Part of this complete breakfast." The way it comes up is, my 5-year-old will be watching TV cartoon shows in the morning, and they'll show a commercial for a children's compressed breakfast compound such as "Froot Loops" or "Lucky Charms, " and they always show it sitting on a table next to a some actual food such as eggs, and the announcer always says: "Part of this complete breakfast." Don't they really mean, "Adjacent to this complete breakfast, " or "On the same table as this complete breakfast"? And couldn't they make essentially the same claim if, instead of Froot Loops, they put a can of shaving cream there, or a dead bat?

Answer: Yes.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#402

Post by Tistel »

dpflan wrote: post #398

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/deepmind-starcraft-results-a... "In a final match against Komincz, streamed live on Twitch, the DeepMind team used a new agent that, unlike those in the other matches, could only see by moving the focus of the in-game camera. As a result, the AI was forced to move its units in a more focussed, human-like way. Despite dominating the game early on, AlphaStar lost. In all the games contes…

If I understood correctly. In the first 10 matches AlphaStar can see the whole map in detail (not just the mini map) at the same time. The humans can only see their camera's view. In the 11th match the AlphaStar can only see via a camera view as well. It has to move the camera the way a human would to see other parts of the map in detail. The 11th game was a fairer test.

This, along with the documentary of the human go players vs the deep mind AI, seems to indicate we are entering an interesting time. The humans start out cocky, then gradually concede the high ground of whatever skill is supposed to be our exclusive domain. I think we will make it through to some new way of living with very capable machines. But, to transition there we are going to have some rough years. Just watching the Star Craft player's fingers flying at the end of the movie makes my carpal tunnel wrists ache. It reminds me of the folklore about "John Henry" trying to keep up with rail laying machine. TL/DR: In the story he beats it for a while, then falls over dead from the Herculean effort required to do so.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#403

Post by kerbalspacepro »

sandov wrote: post #260
rhlala wrote: post #254

Trying to solve Imperfect information games is interesting. But realtime game is not. As computer have edges in boring fileds (apm etc). I feel the real challenge will be Imperfect information, turn based, and cooperation( teamplay based) for ai. Unfortunately there are currently no game AFAIK with these characteristics... Like a 2d turn based counter-strike or dota/lol would be really the good format game to solve.

Civilization?

AlphaCiv would be interesting as hell, but I fear that there isn't historical data for Alpha to consume. I would expect it would have a similar result to AlphaStar though-- it beats the human player before the end game.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#404

Post by orbital-decay »

CydeWeys wrote: post #185
celeritascelery wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a AI that wins at Starcraft only because it has crazy high APM really going to help get to the next X? We could have built that 10 years ago. All it proves is that computers have faster reflexes then humans. That won’t help them become problem solvers for the future.

Speed of play is a fundamentally important gameplay mechanic of any real-time game. One of the main reasons the pros are better than amateurs at these types of game is because they play and react faster. And yes, of course computers are much better at doing things more quickly than humans. It's not even remotely close for us. The AIs are clearly better. It's not cheating either; they are legitimately better at it tha…

>It's not cheating either; they are legitimately better at it than us.

This is not 100% true, the AI still skips the mechanical part (it doesn't have a mouse, keyboard and hands) in this particular case. This alone can introduce insane amounts of additional complexity, and will make AI to not be pixel precise.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#405

Post by Layvier »

I think there's a lot more to limit than average APMs and reaction time, in order to have human-like capabilities. For instance:

- the context switching cost of multitasking

- the precision/speed tradeoff : pro players adjust the mouse speed according to what they want. Selecting exactly the units wanted is very difficult, AlphaStar seemed to do it perfectly.

- the timing precision of an action

With restrictions such as these, I'm honestly confident that AlphaStar won't beat human players anytime soon (once the human players adopt the interesting findings of the AI).

I'm mostly interested in how it will change the meta. Players are often biased by their experience, and regularly the meta shifts entirely without any significant balance update, simply by players finding original strategies

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#406

Post by wnevets »

lrem wrote: post #168
jgon wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the 200ms reaction time seemed overly slanted towards the AI. I don't think that is the actual reaction time of top pros, in the matches the AI played the human player would teleport in from complete invisibility and try to use an instant cast spell and the AI would have already teleported out. Yes the theoretically may have been constrained to a 200ms reaction time, but in practice the AI was playing at a super…

I've recently watched a TED talk explaining how human perception has a lag of about a third of a second. Pro players might be better, but after noticing they also need to take an action.

Getting sub 200ms on something like this benchmark is fairly easy [1]. While waiting for the color to change is different than processing a game like dota2 or sc2 a 200ms limit isn't too unreasonable to me.

I would love to see these AIs get handicapped even more like a full second and really force them to out think humans.

[1] https://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#407

Post by CydeWeys »

celeritascelery wrote: post #231
CydeWeys wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed of play is a fundamentally important gameplay mechanic of any real-time game. One of the main reasons the pros are better than amateurs at these types of game is because they play and react faster. And yes, of course computers are much better at doing things more quickly than humans. It's not even remotely close for us. The AIs are clearly better. It's not cheating either; they are legitimately better at it tha…

So all they really proved is computers are faster then humans. I knew that before this started. The Deepmind team knows the challenge isn’t to beat humans at Starcraft. That is trivially easy with the advantages you mentioned. The challenge is to be better at strategy then a human. That is why they tried to add artificial rules to make the AI have similar physical limitations to a human (emulated mouse, rate limited…

> The Deepmind team knows the challenge isn’t to beat humans at Starcraft. That is trivially easy with the advantages you mentioned.

It's not trivially easy at all. No one had come close before. It took an entire team of ML experts at Google to pull it off. These hard-coded micro bots you're referring to didn't holistically play the entire game and win at it. They're more akin to an aimbot in FPSes, not a self-learning general game-playing AI.

This is yet another in a long string of impressive AI achievements being minimized through moving the goalposts. It's facile and it's boring.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#408

Post by CydeWeys »

saberience wrote: post #272
CydeWeys wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't help but feel that nothing AI does will ever be good enough according to this mindset, i.e. true "intelligence" is by definition things that computers cannot do. Beating the world champion in Chess was, at one point, considered an impossible achievement for computers. Now it's considered so routine it doesn't even count as AI according to many. And in a few months when AlphaStar is beating top human play…

The point is, it's like being impressed by a calculator because it can multiply two massive numbers faster than we can... no shit, that's the whole reason we use computers, because they calculate faster than we can... There's nothing impressive in coding something that can execute something far faster than a human, or be so accurate and beat a human. There were Quake 3 bots that could wreck any human alive 10 years a…

> The point is, it's like being impressed by a calculator because it can multiply two massive numbers faster than we can

Yeah, exactly. And when calculators first came out, people were very impressed by them. They upended entire industries and made new things possible that had simply never been possible before with manual calculation. When you're pooh-poohing the entire computational revolution you might want to take a step back and reconsider your viewpoint. It only seems not impressive now because we were born in a world where electronic calculation is commonplace and thus taken for granted.

If you don't find this achievement impressive, then go look at some turn-based game where reaction time is eliminated entirely that computers still dominate at, like Chess or Go. The AIs are coming. Or give it a few months and they'll come back with a version hard-limited to half the APM of the human players and it'll still dominate. It's clear which way the winds are blowing on this. People who bet against the continued progress of game-playing AIs invariably lose.

Go read the comments here for this exact same discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10981679

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#409

Post by CydeWeys »

celeritascelery wrote: post #216
CydeWeys wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't help but feel that nothing AI does will ever be good enough according to this mindset, i.e. true "intelligence" is by definition things that computers cannot do. Beating the world champion in Chess was, at one point, considered an impossible achievement for computers. Now it's considered so routine it doesn't even count as AI according to many. And in a few months when AlphaStar is beating top human play…

> I just can't help but feel that nothing AI does will ever be good enough It can be good enough in a certain problem space, such as chess. But unlike chess or go, which are purely mental games, Starcraft has large physical component (vision, APM, reaction time). It can make it hard to determine when it has “mastered” this RTS. Like you said, it may be a few more months (years?) before AlphaStar can master Starcraft…

Depending on how you define Chess, seeing the pieces and physically moving them is part of it as well. Chess-playing AIs haven't been required to have robot components because that's not the interesting part of the challenge of Chess. I'd argue the same is true of StarCraft, even more so, given that it's an innately computer-based game in a way that Chess is not. It seems arbitrary to require the presence of an electronic-to-physical bridge in the form of a robot only to then operate physical-to-electronic bridges in the form of a keyboard and mouse. Just let it run via the input devices directly. Give it some years and humans will be able to do this too.

In other words, this isn't an interesting handicap to apply.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#410

Post by worldsayshi »

kerbalspacepro wrote: post #403
sandov wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civilization?

AlphaCiv would be interesting as hell, but I fear that there isn't historical data for Alpha to consume. I would expect it would have a similar result to AlphaStar though-- it beats the human player before the end game.

Perhaps it should have other targets than simply beating the opponent. Like getting good statistics.
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